"Well, it's not unheard of to ask for a particular rate of resurrections or immortalities to distribute in some way among a population as a signing perk!" Ligaya smiles.

... There is going to be such an argument in the Heremethyl between the people who want to award the resurrections as national prizes to people who do impressive and virtuous things, and the people who want to auction them off so they can abolish all taxes entirely.

"I see," he says, slightly mechanically. "Thank you for letting me know."

"That's what I'm here for. Do you have any other questions about the general shape of things or can we start setting up shops and get poor Ortaron out of the middle of the square?"

"We should call a session of the Heremethyl with all the deputies who haven't already been alerted," he says, "and alert the Mayor of the City if he hasn't yet been told. And we'll want a representative from Vanda Nosseo at the session, just so they don't think I've lost my mind. But other than that, no; blessings on your work."

"All right! Thank you so much for your time. Let me give you a spare phone if you need our attention." She produces one and points out the button to turn it on; it has a contact list with the faces of all five team members and another face that she explains is their shipboard coordinator if something renders the five of them unavailable.

He'll want a short explanation but is very impressed by the phone!

(Not in the "immortality" way, to be clear; this is the sort of device he'd expect a society that could travel between the stars to have. It's just that knowing it should be possible is one thing and seeing it is another.)

Once he's sufficiently comfortable with the phone they go collect Escan's servants and rescue Ortaron and find a place to set up shop. Tuturio's the wizard on this team and puts it up once they have a location.

They can eventually find someone who will rent or sell them an empty lot in exchange for merch! This process is followed and observed by a lot of curious people, both those whom Ortaron has been providing with implausible amounts of charity and those who think it's interesting.

And then they have a shop. It will almost immediately be filled with people who want alien shinies.

They can call down some extra staffpeople to receive stories and hand out swag if it's going to be this busy.

Lots of people are happy to provide stories that are false, true, improvised, sung, spoken, or are what they had for breakfast today in exchange for high-tech gizmos. Common themes in stories that are not just fictional include evil rich people (usually though not always aristocrats), karmic turns of fate on the cruel, rich, or arrogant, sex, war both tragic and heroic, and murder. Especially murder. Lots of murder. Something like a third of this society's cultural output seems to be stories in which someone either attempts murder and gets the tables turned on them and dies, or commits murder and is then pursued to their death, usually by supernatural wrath but sometimes just by vengeful relatives or legal processes. Songs supposedly dictated by a criminal about to be hanged (from the neck, until dead) are fairly common, as are talking birds (for some reason).

They have had training on how not to appear overtly horrified by the thematic nastiness in people's stories! This Is Important Cultural Content.

I mean, maybe they can do that for the one that's just about how sad the singer is that her betrothed went off to war and died, leaving her pregnant and incapable of earning a living, or the one about a hardened criminal regretting his wicked life right before he leaves it. Or even the one where -

But they might start to have problems with the one where

Or the one where

Or especially the one where

(No one seems to think these are at all inappropriate to sing around children, who are some of the customers.)

...there are worse songs on the training program but they don't actually have the training material sung by children so, yeah, that's a bit creepsome, but they're going to push through it.

Then they can push through it, and distribute Nossean technology and magic to the populace of a city that has invented gunpowder but not sanitation!

Tuturio has her personal space widget for a reason, and a personal prestidigitator that circles around her and the store and keeps it spotless.

Other things they pick up:

- Law enforcement does not appear to exist? Not, like, in the dwarf way where everyone is subscribed to protection agencies; the government has jails, and has rewards for turning in people who commit crimes in the hopes people will do it, but all prosecution is private and basically that's done by informal groups of rich people protecting themselves or else by other criminals ratting out their rivals for the bounties, and if the person arrested for a crime is innocent someone can be found to testify to their guilt anyway because the financial reward only shows up if the prosecution is successful.

- Also, there's a lot of executing people. "Execution, deferred on condition of exile to the colonies" and "execution, deferred on condition of joining the army" are both totally things.

- Speaking of which, almost nobody in the city was born in it! There's large-scale migration from the countryside to the city for better economic opportunities, which is sometimes a polite word for 'famine.'

- Not everyone in the building has the vote! Some of the men, almost none of the women. (If they ask, there's a property qualification and women's property is made over to their husbands, unless they're widows or veterans.)

- Or is a citizen! (If they ask: There's a test that gets you it, yeah, but you need to pay a fee in order to take it and then it's written and not everyone knows how to read and the test is hard.) 

- In spite of this, most of the people of Wolcyn are really pretty enthusiastic about being part of Wolcyn, specifically! They may not like any part of Wolcyn's government (the city, the heremethyl, the mayor, the army recruiters, the prisons...) but they like Wolcyn! People in Wolcyn are free!

- If the present President is a freethinker, this attitude is not at all universal! There are quite a lot of people who do, actually, believe in angels and demons very literally. (Someone outside is shouting about how their store sells divine artifacts which is totally immoral. Someone else appears to have gotten his wires crossed and shown up to yell about how they sell contraception, which is also totally immoral, and they're kind of yelling at each other now while the crowd picks their pockets.)

- There is definitely a war on! People are very unhappy about war taxes but they're also very positive about Our War Heroes and negative about the Admiral and his attempts to conquer the world. One person tells the story of an absolutely disastrous attempt to get a regiment to the front that - between plague, rioting, the incompetence of the rich gentleman who organized the regiment (who'd paid for his commission), and sheer bad luck - got three-quarters of it killed (mostly by disease and wild animals) before it was cut off and surrounded and everyone was about to die, and then ends the story on this cliffhanger and asks if she can get another piece of magic high-tech gear for finishing it.

They will allow sufficiently long stories to be issued as serials, sure.

This is kind of a lot of problems but not a staggeringly unusual number of them and it sort of seems like most of them are the nice kind of problem that will dissolve with free migration and greater wealth. They push the bus tokens to indecisive customers and sometimes throw them in as a bonus for particularly enlightening stories. Do they have a place to put a bus stop yet?

Actually, the ending is "then the young woman who was the viewpoint got a hero crest and saved everyone," very dramatically but not taking much time.

Sure, they can get somewhere to put a bus stop!

Bus stop goes up! A bus appears in it! Tuturio stations herself at it to act as a sort of tour guide; she can display route maps and recommend sights to see and it's a little more compatible with her personal space than the shop is.

They get very large numbers of very curious people who want to see EVERYTHING!

If presented with bus tokens Tuturio will wave people aboard the bus; the bus-teleporter will then take them to Edda Station One, where they can transfer to wherever they like. There are information kiosks if they can't read the signs.

What does Edda Station One look like? And what do the signs and information kiosks say about what exciting places to visit are?

Edda Station One is huge and busy. It's a sort of tower, tall enough that it's hard to make out the top, with a big open atrium in the middle all the way up, and spokes leading to different platforms where different buses on different lines leave and depart; the edges of the atrium that aren't devoted to multi-car elevators have various shops and stalls, and art installations, and the information booths are scattered across the ground floor and also in among the stores up on the mezzanines above. The line names have a logic to them, but it's a fairly opaque logic if you don't know the system and it will look a bit random to people from Wolcyn; there are symbols of various colors and shapes associated with each, tiled out in paths on the floor one could follow. People - dozens of kinds of people, though most look at least basically human - are going this way and that, chattering and pulling luggage and making purchases and taking no particular note of the Wolcyn visitors.

Information kiosk staff recommend different things! There's a good roller coaster park two stops away if you take this intra-Edda line - there's a perpetual concert on Nest, where the Yeerks who turned into Elves live, that's in Cube, they rotate in and out - amazing restaurant in Revelation, it can handle the customers despite being constantly mobbed because the chef's a demon - history museum in Stork, fantastic introduction to the concept of servantmaking and Stork culture - Dreamward's great fun, the cities never sleep, the suns are beautiful - amazing nature walks in Atarale - Shadow's pushing tourism these days, you can get a guided tour through some unique Elf architecture for spare change if you want - Zovis banned motorboats and has tons of manatees you can swim with -

The crowd includes people wandering around amazed looking at anything in particular, people stealing everything that isn't nailed down, people telling sob stories to anyone in earshot, and people trying to figure out what they can buy here to sell at ridiculous prices back home really, really fast, among others.

Stealing doesn't work very well - the stores mostly turn out to have security golems that grab the hands of thieves and the one that doesn't is staffed by a vampire who is fully capable of doing it himself. Sob stories, on the other hand, work great and will often get tips or even more effusive offers of help. If any of these people want to move to Vanda Nossëo and live on basic income and crash on a random stranger's couch, today is their lucky day.